By the time we're about 40 pages in, we've also met a hired assassin who wants to confess to an old crime, a U.S. That's a small part of just the beginning. A little later, she hears his minivan drive off, and when she looks in the pile of snapshots again, the mystery photo is missing. Grace gets ready for bed when Jack gets a phone call. No, he doesn't know who the other people are, how could he? Later that night, after Jack gets the children ready for bed, the perfect, loving dad, she shows him the odd photograph. And Grace doesn't recognize anybody in the image, until she suddenly realizes that one of the 'strangers'' is Jack, many years before, when he was about college age. Most of the snapshots, taken by her loving husband Jack, are of their children, Emma and Max, on an apple-picking outing. Grace Lawson, a painter and mother, picks up some photographs at Photomat.

It's only when page 374 turns that the reader has a chance to breathe, say 'Wow!'' and marvel at the impressively interconnected structure. It has a story that ends up being enormously complicated, but is so well written and such a compelling read that the complexities don't slow anything down they're just part of the mystery. His 'Tell No One'' was excellent, one of the best mysteries of 2001, but then his next book, 'Gone for Good'' wasn't quite as brilliant, and the one after that, 'No Second Chance,'' was merely good.īut his latest, 'Just One Look,'' reverses that slide completely and puts him back near the top of the mystery thriller pyramid. Harlan Coben seemed to be on a downward slide.

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